Farley: A low-level word nerd reaches out, or maybe not

Among the benefits of semi-retirement that I've realized only recently — six years after I waved goodbye to daily labor — turns out to be a key reason my father hung 'em up, too.

"I was in a meeting," he said, "and I thought, 'I don't have to listen to this crap anymore.' "

Exactly.

I don't know how many of us are left, but I'm a low-level word nerd. I like descriptive ones — cacophony, shimmer. I like, generally, to see new words enter the language. This is embarrassing, but I was an overage college student when "ripped off" became a common term for "stolen" or "cheated," and I looked for places to use it because I thought it was cool.

You know what's not cool, though? "Reach out" isn't cool.

"We reached out to Oakland police," I heard a TV news person say the other day.

Reached out. What was wrong with, say, "asked?"

"Drill down;" there's another one. We no longer do research or think things over, we drill down.

Isn't it colorful? No. It was colorful the first time, when you had to think, "What … oh." Also colorful once, "I could tell you, but I'd have to kill you." Use that now, and you deserve the scorn you will get.

This kind of talk is often called "office speak," because ... well, I know why it's called that — because it subs for real speech in offices, duh — but I don't know how these constructs inevitably crawl onto the palates of middle managers.

I used to work for an editor who was a museum of office speak. She picked up so many roll-mindlessly-from-the-tongue words and phrases that I seriously believe she studied them, so she could talk like a Boss.

She was the first person I heard say "proactive" (universal today, but absent from my 1990 Webster's). She couldn't cross the street without taking jaywalking "to the next level." In a period of crippling staff cuts, the building resonated with her reassurances that we'd "work smarter, not harder."

When "share" became an all-purpose verb for any activity involving more than one person, she couldn't even give you a hard time — she had to share it with you. She once summoned me to "share my concerns" about the word "sucks," at the time a risky way of saying "isn't to my liking."

Two others I've heard lately are "pre-plan" (slowly replacing "plan for the future"), and "pre-prepare." This just in, non-word nerds: Ahead is the only direction you can plan, and all preparation is pre. "Going forward," same thing. There's no going back, else I'd still be a college sophomore with the GI Bill and a new convertible.

An old rule of writing sort of applies here if you want to purge office speak from your life: Whenever a phrase pops into your head as a single unit — "maximize the potential;" "the lion's share" — forget it. It's used up. Or fall back on a rule a writer friend has posted above her desk: